Hedging For Disaster – 5 Plays that Make 500% if the Market Falls
by Phil - July 3rd, 2010 8:27 am
Well, I am totally disappointed with Friday’s close.
I was going to be pleased but then we had a very sharp, last minute sell-off on heavy volume that pretty much ruined the day. I have been bullish and we have been buying at what we thought was a bottom, moving up to 35% invested in long-term, hedged positions but what if the 20% built-in protection (see "How to Buy a Stock for a 15-20% Discount") isn’t going to be enough?
You know I am a big fan of taking cash off the table in either direction, and we were not greedy and took most of our short-term bearish hedges out in the last two days. We had a couple of new hedges already in this week’s Member Chat but let’s look at some other trade ideas that can bullet-proof our portfolios, all the way back to the March, 2009 lows. Our usual Mattress Strategy is not going to be enough to save us if we have another "flash crash" - especially one that sticks! Keep in mind that this is the biggest market decline we’ve had since February ’09 so adding a layer of protection here doubles our returns if this is the first leg of a major sell-off, or it gives us a smaller hedge that we can roll up later while we take our bigger hedges off the table. As I have to say WAY too often to members – It’s not a profit until you cash it in!
Hedging for disaster is a concept I advocated during another "recovery," in October of 2008, where we made our cover plays to carry us through a worrisome holiday season and into Q1 earnings – "just in case." That "just in case" saved a lot of portfolios! The idea of disaster hedges high return ETFs that will give you 3-5x returns in a major downturn. That way, 5% allocated of your portfolio to protection can turn into 15-25% on a dip, giving you some much-needed cash right when there is a good buying opportunity. At the time, I advocated SKF Jan $100s at $19. SKF hit $300 around Thanksgiving and those calls made a profit of over $280 (1,400%), so putting even just 5% of your portfolio into that financial hedge would give you back 75% of your portfolio when you cash out.
Keep in mind these are INSURANCE plays – you expect to LOSE, not win but, if you…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up – The Madness of the Markets (Part II)
by Phil - May 23rd, 2010 6:33 am
Well this is a first.
For some reason I keep getting an error trying to continue the previous post so I’m just going to continue here. Sorry about that but it’s too early on a Sunday to wake up the programmers. So, where were we? Oh yes, we had just finished getting full circle back to last weekend’s post, where we reiterated bearish positions. My target for this week kept falling from 10,700, to 10,500 to 10,200 as we lost all confidence in the ability of our indexes to recover and, of course, Europe fell quickly apart:
Monday Monetary Madness – Ewwwwro!
It’s amazing how quickly people can lose faith in one of the World’s 3 major currencies. So amazing that I can’t believe you can sleep at night! Have I mentioned how much I like TBT lately? The Euro dropped from $1.51 in November to a low of $1.21 on Tuesday, that’s our 20% rule, by the way and a retrace to $1.27 (20% of the drop) is not going to be very impressive until we’re well over it.
Unless you are an exporter (and who in America does that anymore?) then a strong dollar is kind of nice but the dollar isn’t actually strong, we’re down 6% against the Yen this month, it’s just the Euro is very weak. Unfortunately for Japan – everyone there is an exporter because their own people stopped spending money in 1990, when their market fell off a cliff and Japan’s people lost all faith in investing schemes and sham financing deals – you know, the stuff that pretty much drives the US economy…
The Media talks about Japan’s lost decade, but this is the start of decade 3 of their deflationary cycle as the Nikkei has dropped from 40,000 in 1990 to 20,000 in 2000 to 10,000 in 2010. Remember when Japan was the next big thing and they were going to take over the World and US executives were learning Japanese and US firms were rushing to tie up business in Japan etc., etc? Thank goodness we’re too smart to fall into a trap like that again!
Nonetheless, I called a top at $25 on EUO and you can see us getting out on Monday as it topped out for the day. Tuesday they ran it up to $25.43 but that was when we went short (I’m fickle that way) so…
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Monday Monetary Madness – Ewwwwro!
by Phil - May 17th, 2010 8:29 am
Wow, nobody wants thos Euros!
Of course, that kind of makes me want them as the Euro collapsed to $1.223 last night and we moved into "crazy oversold" territory. Just 3 years ago supermodel Gisele Bundchen (left) INSISTED on being paid only in Euros (classic sign of a top!). It’s not like we’re going to run in and buy Euros but I think $25 is plenty on EUO so we’re done with those for now and they are up another $2 from when we were already thrilled with them on May 5th. That was the same post in which I said about oil "that bubble may be popping too" and we’re down from $85 then to $72 this morning and we touched $70 this morning which is our 20% retrace from our April $87 highs.
Unfortunately, I can only tell you what is going to happen and how to profit from it, I can’t fix things (well I could but they don’t listen to me) although I may be attending next month’s New York Forum, where business leaders, hedge fund managers, sovereign wealth fund managers and private equity funds (in other words "THEY") will get together and decide "YOUR" future. I am not selling out, this is not really the same "THEY" as the Gang of 12, this is the bottom 90% of the top 0.1% trying to make an actual difference in that very unique way that pushy New Yorkers are able to do (did you see how we’re taking over the Supreme Court by the way?).
Back then the Republican "Contract with America" promised us term limits, job creation and wage enhancements, a balanced budget law, and restrictions on American military activity in foreign wars. That helped to usher in a decade of Republican rule and I don’t even have…
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Prior Weekly Wrap-Up – February Expiration Day Special!
by Phil - February 19th, 2010 7:17 am
I didn’t get to do a wrap-up last week so we have a lot of trades to go over and, with expiration looming and the Fed tightening, I thought it would be good to just get the list out on Friday so we can adjust our rolls to March where neccessary (in bold under appropriate positions).
In our Feb 7th Wrap-Up, I was gung-ho bullish saying "It’s Only a 55-Point Drop You Wimps!" and we had been BUYBUYBUYing at the bottom all week, especially Wed-Fri as the market spiked through our projected support at Dow 10,000 but not enough to change our minds as we bottom-fished on AAPL (2 trades), ABX, ACOR, AKAM, AMED, BRK/B (2), C, CCJ (3), CSCO, DELL, FXI, GE, GOOG, IBM, LLY, LOW, NLY, TBT (5 times!), TM (3), TNA, USO (yep, we wen long oil) and UYG. To say we were weigting bullish by that Monday was an understatement as we has finished the weekend in a bullish stance and were relying on our disaster hedges to protect us.
Those disaster hedges are an interesting set to look at, especially now that we’ve recovered 400 points:
- DXD July $27/33 bull call spread at $2.50, now $2 – down 20%
- We can roll the $27 calls to the $25 calls for $5 to widen the spread and drop our b/e from $29.50 to $28.50
- EDZ July $3/8 bull call spread at $2.10, now $1.60 - down 23%
- EDZ Apr $10 calls sold for .70, now .15 – up 78% (pair trade)
- SDS 2011 $36/40 bull call spread at $1.30, now $1 – down 18%
- We can roll the $36 calls to the $33 calls for $1.10
- TBT Jan $35/45 bull call spread at $6.30, now $7.40 - up 17%
- TBT March $50s sold for .65, now $1.22 – down 87% (pair trade)
This is what is great about disaster hedges. The potential upside on these spreads, if the market headed south was up about 100% on the 4 trades so a commitment of 5% of your portfolio to each one (20%) would give you back 40% of your portfolio in cash if the markets tanked. Already, after 2 weeks, we have the markets heading in the opposite direction and what is the cost? Not even 20% of the 20% you may have allocated, a 4% insurance premium while the 80% of the portfolio that is bullish caught a huge rally up…
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Weekly Wrap-Up, it’s Only a 55-Point Drop You Wimps!
by Phil - February 7th, 2010 12:19 pm
That’s right, I said WIMPS!
I have never heard so much whining and crying and complaining about a market drop as I have the past few weeks. Last week, I pointed out that we had only fallen 105 points from the prior week (10,172 to 10,067) and this week we fell ALL THE WAY to 10,012 to finish the week and you would think the world was ending (again) from the way the MSM has been acting.
By Friday the panic was palpable as we gave up Monday and Tuesday’s bogus gains to test new lows for the year – testing, in fact, the lowest levels the market has hit since last November and I pointed out in Friday’s post that it reminded me of when BSC and LEH went under and everyone panicked and sold Financials off to the point where Warren Buffet was willing to give GS $5Bn AFTER they bounced 50% – THAT’s how undervalued the financials were in November of 2008.
What do we do while people are panicking? We BUY! We don’t BUYBUYBUY like Cramer’s Pavlovian Peons but we sure do BUY and take some nice entry positions with sensible hedges. I was finally motivated to finish updating our Buy List on Friday and 18 of our 38 positions were highlighted (immediately actionable) on Friday. Sure they may go lower, but we’re buying them with 20% buffers built into the positions and then we can double down if they drop 40% (back to Nov 2008 lows) and then we’ll have our entries down 10% from the lowest levels of the past decade or so that we can hold until the next decade – what’s there to panic over?
If I wanted to buy IBM in January but thought it was a little pricey at $134, why would I not be HAPPY to have the opportunity to make an enty at $122, back at where they were pre FABULOUS October earnings? I can buy IBM for $122 and take advantage of the panic-induced VIX at 26 to sell July $125 calls for $6.60 and the July $120 puts for $6.65 for a net entry of $108.75 with a call away at $125 for a $16.25 profit (15%) in 5 months. If IBM should fall below $120, we will have a second round of the stock put to us as $120 for an average entry of $114.38, another 6.2% lower than it is…
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Testy Tuesday – Back to our Bounce Levels?
by Phil - February 2nd, 2010 8:27 am
Too tricky to call!
We’re trying to be bullish now, so we don’t complain about stick saves and we got a nice one into yesterday’s close and another one in the futures, which were down about 50 at 3am – but it still looks like BS to me.
On Thursday morning I said: "Our 5% "must hold levels" remain: Dow 10,165, S&P 1,088, Nas 2,200, NYSE 7,000 and RUT 620 with 3 of 5 below = BAD!" We got the Dow, S&P and the NYSE back over the line yesterday and now we need the Nasdaq and the Russell to show us the money and catch up. Of course, this is just our "averting disaster" levels – we haven’t even broken our "weak bounce" targets of: Dow 10,300, S&P 1,105, Nasdaq 2,225, NYSE 7,100 and Russell 625 that the 5% rule predicted in last Monday’s post.
Last Wednesday I asked the question, is it weakness or good old fashioned consolidation? My premise was that commodities were overvalued and we were due for some rotational correction, which was GOOD and HEALTHY. The market still has much to prove and we are still pursuing disastrous economic policies that will all end in tears but, in the meantime, we can still party like it’s 1999 as long as we know where the nearest exit is – and that’s what our Disaster Hedging is all about.
We took positions on DXD and QID yesterday as the weak bounce we got was a good chance to establish new hedges and I’m hoping we get another push in commodities so we can short some of them. EDZ is getting interesting again, back at $5.65, about 10% away from our sweet spot ($5) for taking up a position but we may hit them early if the US indexes can’t provide some leadership this week. As you can see from Trader Mike’s charts – we have plenty of resistance to get through and we’re still waiting to see a rise on anything but weak volume to give us more confidence.
Germany gave our confidence a small boost this morning as Retail Sales, adjusted for inflation and seasonal swings, rose 0.8 percent from November, when they dropped a revised 1.7 percent. Germany’s government this month raised its forecast for 2010 economic growth to 1.4 percent from 1.2 percent. While the economy is still grappling with the aftermath of its worst recession since World War…
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How to Have a Happy and Safe New Year with Hedges
by Phil - December 31st, 2009 8:28 am
"Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving Hell with them as usual." ~ Mark Twain
"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” ~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce
I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a very happy New Year. 2009 was challenging to say the least – clearly it was the best of times and it was the worst of times but if 2009 has taught us anything it’s that there is always an opportunity for the perseverent. We went from the depths of despair in March straight into a 9-month rally of epic proportions. While we may question the wisdom of the underlying fundamentals, we cannot question the evidence of just how resilient our economy and our people really are and that, if nothing else, gives me great hope for our future.
I myself have gone from being the lone market optimist back in March (see our Crisis, Year One Review) to being one of the 11% of the remaining pessimists as the market takes back over 50% of it’s losses (I am arguing that it’s less than 50% in my Last Charts of the Decade). Whether we are, as I think, at the apex of a very normal Fibonacci retracement or whether we are at the mid stage of a full recovery back to our 2007 glory remains to be seen but for now, I can re-use the same statement I made to Members when I argued the media was too bearish in March (click on image for great video):
"Television is a powerful and emotional medium, it is very difficult to go against the will of ALL these "experts" when they get on TV and all tell you to sell (or buy) and then their TV station backs them up with bearish news and bearish guests – it’s a natural bias that develops, they aren’t going to make their own paid personalities look foolish by contradicting them with facts and dissenting opinions."
Substitute bullish for bearish and we have my quote of the day for December 31st, 2009. If you do nothing else today in the markets, at least consider the idea of establishing some hedges – just…
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Which Way Wednesday – Hedging for Disaster
by Phil - December 9th, 2009 8:06 am
We got our sell-off, now what?
Despite generally failing our levels yesterday (see Fibozachi review), the Dow held 10,250 and the SOX were green so we wrangled ourselves back to neutral into the close. Over and over again my best advice to bears in this rally has been to take profits off the table quickly as we rarely string more than 2 days in a row together of downward movement. With that in mind, we moved to lock in our bearish profits ahead of the 3pm stick save which, though disappointing yesterday, at least was predictable as ever.
We even went long on oil futures at $72.50 (after a failed attempt to go long at $73) and we came just short of our goal of $74 this morning at $73.88, which is close enough to take the money and run in the futures (pays $10 per penny per contract). So we’re looking for a small retrace today (up about 0.5%) to retest our levels and then we’ll see how we’re going to play into the afternoon depending on what holds up.
Meanwhile, I think it’s time to revisit the concept of hedging for disaster, something I advocated during another "recovery," in October of last year, where we made our cover plays to carry us through a worrisome holiday season and into Q1 earnings – "just in case." The idea of disaster hedges high return ETFs that will give you 3-5x returns in a major downturn. That way, 10% allocated of your portfolio to protection can turn into 30-50% on a dip, giving you some much-needed cash right when there is a buying opportunity.
At the time, I advocated SKF Jan $100s at $19. SKF hit $300 around Thanksgiving and those calls made a profit of over $280 (1,400%), so putting just 5% of your portfolio into that financial hedge would give you back 90% of your portfolio when you cash out. Keep in mind these are INSURANCE plays – you expect to LOSE, not win but if you need to ride out a lot of bullish positions through an uncertain period, this is a pretty good way to go.
Another play we picked at the time was DXD Apr $55s at $14.20. DXD doubled that same month, went back down to $50 and was back at $90 in March. The nice thing about playing options rather than the stock is the Apr…
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Testy Tuesday Morning – Big Data Day
by Phil - November 24th, 2009 8:26 am
Busy, busy today with lots of data!
At the moment (8am), I only know that retail sales were flat to last week, which was 1% better than last year but this week is 3.3% better than last year because LAST YEAR TOTALLY SUCKED! That’s right, we are now comping to numbers that are so atrocious that in order to miss them we would have to all dig holes in our backyards, cover them with tarps (no, not the bailout package but a good conceptual image) and drink only rainwater and eat earthworms. Anything better than that will give us more economic activity than we had last November, when the market was completing a 50% dive off the previous year’s highs and we weren’t sure there was going to anything to be thankful for on November 27th.
Our market hit rock bottom on November 21st, the Friday before Thanksgiving (and an option expiration day) at about 7,500 on the Dow. People were generally shell-shocked but we did bounce back to 8,500 and drifted around there through Jan 1st (9,000) before plunging to 6,500 by March 9th. THAT my friends, is the period we are comping against! So beware "improvements" being sighted in the MSM as we are now comparing our weak recovery to a total train wreck and yes, it’s much better now, but better in the way that the Chicago Bears (4-6) are better than the Detroit Lions (2-8), not the way the Minnesota Vikings (9-1) are better than the Lions.
Later today we have an update (and downgrade) of our Q3 GDP followed by Redbook Chain Store Sales and Case-Shiller Home Prices at 9. At 10 we get Consumer Confidence (or lack thereof), the FHFA Housing Price Index, the Richmond Fed Report and State Street’s Investor Confidence Index. Later today we have the results of a massive $39Bn 3-year Note Auction, the Fed Minutes at 2pm along with Industry Charge-offs and, finally, at 5pm we get the ABC Consumer Confidence (if any) Index.
It’s a very brave bunch of bulls who have run the futures up half a point off their lows this morning with all that data coming up. When I say brave of course, I mean the disgustingly manipulative and should be thrown in jail kind of brave but, since none of our regulators seem to care about the nonsense that goes on every day at the commodity and futures exchanges – I guess they are…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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